Michael Leonard was famous for his homoerotic drawings and paintings, which my generation of young gay men first saw in the early 1980s at his one-man show at Fischer Fine Art in London. In 1983 Gay Men’s Press published Changing, a small square book of 50 drawings, to own which was de rigueur at the time.
Leonard’s unique gift as a draughtsman was to make the viewer see his sexy male nudes with something of that thrilling stolen glance so familiar to gay men the world over. The allure of momentary desire is hard to conjure with a pencil or brush, but he had the technical brilliance and instinctive eye to do just that. Now viewed with a nostalgic gaze by many, his pictures captured young fit guys on the cusp of the Aids epidemic, when everything changed utterly.
